Appreciating a day's work, and why stones are the best birthday cake ingredients...

This year has been pretty full on.

I took a few days off in January to go to Sundance with Edward Browne , spent a few days doing DIY on my 160 year old project of a house, and enjoyed Alex Browne 's recent graduation from Edinburgh.?

But the first 6 months haven't exactly burned through my holiday allowance.

So, Sophie and I booked a long weekend in Krakow a few weeks back.? A city break with culture, food, drink, and plenty of walking seemed liked it would tick all of our boxes.

And, tick them it did.

Krakow is an amazing city.? We learned a lot and experienced some amazing, thought provoking sights.?

We also did around 27,000 steps per day so felt like we'd earned our 8% Wheat Beer.

But, thanks to Rynair's clumsy flight schedules, we were left with a full day to kill and not enough sights to see on our last day.? Long lunches, bigger walks, and a torture museum (which was grim on so many levels) still left a few hours of no-man's-land time to fill.? Too little to travel far, but too much to sit and people watch.

Then, we found the underground Rynek museum - the medieval remains of the original Krakow settlement right in the main square right in the heart of Krakow.? It charts Polish "mythology, folklore and history" - including vampire burials (you decide which of these 3 classifications this fits into!). The experience takes visitors through a subterranean excavation of the original streets and structures with interactive content, maps, reconstructions and subtitled videos.

I love this kind of shit.

Being transplanted in time is so humbling and grounding.

I also love the notion of retro-futurism, and how technology existed in bygone times vs. how people experienced it, adopted it and anticipated how it might evolve in the future.

Technology is always advancing. At a time where people actually believed in vampires, the notion of actual technology that worked (e.g: a 382 metre deep salt mine) vs. implausible folklore beliefs is such an interesting contrast.

"We can dig a mine as deep is the Eiffel Tower, complete with a cathedral. But, we're also convinced that some women eat people, so we'll behead them and ceremonially bury them just incase..."

We probably spent more time underground than we should have done, and much more time than the visitors who entered the Rynek Underground at the same time as we did.? We watched every video, read every plaque, played with every interactive display, and marvelled at every excavated object.

And, why not??

We had time to fill and we'd blown our Zloty.

On the final stretch towards the exit, we walked through some original stone buildings preserved beneath the streets.? They'd been constructed using a kind of dry stone wall technique with primitive mortar, preserved for 700 years.

As I stared down into the former 'room' below me, I noticed a large stone block that had been placed as a foundation stone for the wall of the building.? It was larger than the others and jutted out slightly, which is what drew my attention to it.

As I focused on it, I couldn't help thinking that somebody laid that stone.

Many centuries ago, this stone was somebody's day's work.

This worker stirred awake one morning, ate breakfast, trudged to the ancient construction site, toiled away long and hard, and laid that stone.

We don't know who or exactly when.? But we can be sure that it was somebody's day's work.? Their arbitrage for sweat, lactic acid and a calorific expenditure.

Zoom out and there are others - many stones that were laid by that person and their colleagues to make that wall in that room in that place, before heading home to watch the Medieval equivalent of Netflix.

Work gets done.?

The outcome of work is often taken for granted or lost over time, either buried beneath centuries of future construction or destroyed and replaced by more work.

And, when you add up the hours, days, weeks and months of work on a large project like this, that blur of continuous effort just becomes "a thing".? We lose sight of the individual effort of humans, horses, minds and biceps that created it, and we just accept that "a thing" now exists that wasn't there before.

Making "things" through work like this is fascinating.

I stood thinking...

"If this whole city was created through cumulative days of work, how long would it take to rebuild it from scratch to the same standard??How many people, for how long??

Every stone is laid on top of the next. And every prior stone is taken for granted by the person who lays later stones.

Isaac Newton talked of "standing on the shoulders of giants", but there's a less grandiose version - "building on the boulders of others". One is about intellect and innovation, one is about labour, sweat and efforts - no matter what the scale of the feat. Doing small things on top of small things to create something bigger for people to take for granted.

Everything you and your team did yesterday, or does today is a stone in some future wall.

"Whatever you do in life will be insignificant but it is very important that you do it because you can't know. You can't ever really know the meaning of your life. And you don't need to. Every life has a meaning, whether it lasts one hundred years or one hundred seconds." - Ghandi

That box you just placed on a PowerPoint slide is a stone in a wall. That sentence you just full-stopped in that Word document is a stone in a wall. That call you just had with your team, and those actions you agreed - stones in a wall.

Those 10 lines of code you just wrote, and debugged - stones in a wall. That door you just repaired, or lock you replaced, or washing machine your plumbed in - stones in a wall.

That tree you just planted, plant you just watered, water you just poured, pour you waited to set, set of badgers you just culled, colour you just mixed - all stones in a wall.

That phone call you just made to that client, or to your mum, or your child, or to your friend - they were stones in wall too.

All these little stones contribute to what you're building in life and work.

And, as Ghandi said - it's really easy to take them for granted, but really important you don't.

So, when you're going about your day-to-day tasks and watching your day tick by, noticing the little red bar on your calendar gravitate through your meetings to the bottom of your screen - all of these little things you do build up to bigger things that matter more.

Today is Resulting IT 's 20th Birthday.

20 years ago, one of my little stones was to register a company. Then a domain. Then file for VAT. Then open a bank account.

Little foundation stones.

There have been millions of other stones laid on top of those by me and others - some visible, some not. Each relationship we built has added a stone. Each deliverable the team drafter, then finished has been a stone. Those things that Julian or Jack or Rachael just said in the office were little stones.

20 years laying little stones resulted in the walls that created the first few stories of something tangible.

A legacy.

Last year, we had our brand 'valued' for the first time, and It now sits on our balance sheet.

That's a really hard thing to get your head around - little stones of effort conspire to create something that doesn't actually exist which has a monetary value.

We've delivered services to more than 100 clients in a super competitive, global market.

We've signed huge global brands and bagged an eye-watering NPS of 93%.

We've secured a Private Equity investment which has underlined confidence in our business model, management team, positioning and client references.

I'm super proud of the walls we've built out of little stones.

I'm also indebted to a whole crowd of people who have laid stones too - staff, associates, partners, clients, friends, family members, competitors, advisors, software vendors, and strangers - many who have become members of the earlier classifications in this list.

Every keystroke and spoken word, every thought on a long drive or a dog walk, every thumbs up or frown across a meeting room - all these things that these people have done have all made up the atoms and carbon of those stones.

I don't take any of that for granted.

Which is why I wanted to publicly thank everyone who has been part of our first two decades in business.

Happy Birthday Resulting IT ,.

Here's to the next stones laid in today's day's work...